Page 10 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

INTRODUCTION

Where face-to-face selling isn’t an option—because your total pool
of prospects is too big or geographically dispersed, or you don’t have
the budget for a salesforce, or it just doesn’t fit with your business
model—the answer is copywriting.

I wrote my first sales copy in May 1986. It was for a market research
report. I had to write a direct mail pack consisting of a two-sided
A4 sales letter and a four-page A4 brochure. There was also a
press release, I seem to remember. Oh, and a catalog entry. No web
copy—that wasn’t invented then. Nor, in any real sense, were PCs.
So I wrote my copy longhand on lined paper with a rather beautiful
Waterman fountain pen. For younger readers, a fountain pen is
a sort of metal tube filled with liquid ink (not toner) and tipped
with a little piece of gold-plated steel that squirts the ink onto a
piece of paper. Once I had finished my first draft, I handed it to the
Marketing Department secretary—Pauline—and she went off to
type it up on . . . the computer. You could tell when Pauline switched
the computer on because all the lights dimmed and an unearthly
humming permeated the building.

Some time later Pauline would turn up again with the copy, now
printed in Courier 12 point on crisp sheets of white paper. I’d read
it over, make a few edits, and hand it back to P—who’d repeat the
whole process until I was happy.

Nowadays I write my copy on a PC or, occasionally, a laptop, as
I suppose you do. But although the technology I use to write copy
has changed, the techniques I use are the same as they were in May
1986. I still write plans before writing copy. I still try to figure out
what my reader wants to hear, rather than what I want to write. I
still make a list of all the ways the product I’m selling benefits the

100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS • 1